Via a previous grapevine I was once hooked into, I was given the secret to having some success in Hollywood. I was told that to succeed, you don’t have to be the best — you just have to wear out all of your competition. All of those thousands of people who came to that town with the same dream as you — you’re not competing against their talent. You are competing against their will.

It’s also an illegal club drug, known as “special K”, or “vitamin K”. The street version is usually sold in a powder form that can be snorted or mixed into drinks, or dissolved into a liquid and injected. It acts like LSD, causing vivid hallucinations in users and a sensation of floating outside their bodies.

This history should provide lessons for how communications technology can shape our democracy. That is why the battle over the Internet is so important. There has been much talk flowing through the media and even more through the Net about the possibility of Internet Service Providers charging users by the amount of bandwidth they use. This is usually referred to as net neutrality, meaning the Internet plays no favorites when it comes to how much you use it.